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Minnespiel, Op 101

Introduction

This set of eight Rückert settings—four solos, two duets, two quartets—contains much beautiful music. Surprisingly (and similarly to the slightly earlier Spanisches Liederspiel Op 78) the baritone is ignored in terms of being given a solo of his own and two of the songs are allocated to the tenor. The work was written in the summer of 1849 following the abortive revolution in Dresden in May of that year (an incident in Schumann’s life fully discussed in the notes to Volume 9 of this series). The diaries show us that this was far from being an uncomplicated period in the composer’s life in terms of his mood-swings and moments of anguished depression. Eric Sams believed that it was in the Minnespiel that we first begin to see deteriorative change in Schumann: ‘there are ominous signs not only in the man but in the music’. It is true that there are moments of edginess here, a certain awkwardness, that are not to be found in the music of 1840; but modern scholarship would certainly give this admittedly uneven work the benefit of the doubt as being simply a gateway work into the composer’s later style—in itself a conscious change of stylistic direction rather than simply the deterioration that Sams diagnoses. Under the fingers, however, some of Minnespiel feels less effective than it might, and the pianist operating on the shop floor, as it were, may give Sams’s view slightly more credence. For the singers this is not entirely a straightforward work either—particularly in terms of shape and tempo—and only the most assured performance of this cycle, seemingly conceived for domestic presentation, will receive an enthusiastic response from listeners.

Schumann’s poetic source for Minnespiel was the first volume of six in Rückert’s Gesammelte Gedichte printed in Erlangen by the firm of Carl Heyder; this initial instalment was issued in 1836. A large portion of the volume is given over to the same Liebesfrühling poems in five sections (or ‘Sträuße’, each being a huge poetic garland or bouquet) that had been the source of Schumann’s Op 37 songs from 1841 recorded much earlier in the Hyperion series, as well as texts in the Op 25 Myrten: Widmung, the two Lieder der Braut, and Zum Schluss.

The composer seems to have searched far and wide within these many poems for his purposes (see the outline below). From the musical point of view he has clearly gone to some trouble to tie this music together in terms of the progression of tonalities. The work begins and ends in G major with substantial C major pieces at either end of the cycle to reinforce the plagal or religious aspect of a work where marriage represents a holy commitment. The central songs move into the flat keys and return to C and G major via a single song in a minor key. The keys for the individual songs are given below; taken together they make an exemplary tonal scheme for a work of this kind:

(i) Meine Töne still und heiter and Die Liebste hat mit Schweigen (two separate poems joined into a single song) are Nos V and IV of a vast 85-poem ‘Zwischenspiel’ (Interlude) rather strangely placed within the body of the second section of Liebesfrühling (‘Zweiter Strauß’) which in itself has 55 numbered poems (pp.278–9); G major (first poem) and C major (second poem).

(ii) Liebster, deine Worte stehlen is No XXXVIII of the first section (‘Erster Strauß’), pp.232–3; after the line of introductory recitative the key is G major.

(iii) Ich bin dein Baum is No XLIII of the same section as (ii) above, p.235; E flat major.

(iv) Mein schöner Stern! is No XXIV of the ‘Zweiter Strauß’, p.253; E flat major (with a deliberately delayed arrival in the tonic).

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My soft joyous singing
Soars up to my love’s window!
If only I could
Follow it there!
O sweet songs,
Lay your sorrows on her heart,
Since my stern and beautiful love
Will not let me rest on her heart.

My beloved has silently
Opened her window,
And leant smilingly
Out for me to see her
Greet me
With her serene gaze,
Strewing nothing but roses
Onto me below.

She smiles with her lips
And she smiles with her cheeks;
And the world blossoms at once
Like a flowering rosebush;
She smiles down roses on me,
She smiles at me
And closes the window again,
And smiles secretly to herself.

She smiles in her room
With her rose-like gleam;
But I, alas, may
Not be with her;
If only I could nestle up to her
For a year in her little room!
She must surely
Have smiled it full of roses.

In a cycle which is, as one might expect, about marital bliss (there was never a poet who devoted so many lines of verse to this theme as Rückert) the composer chooses to begin with a poem that takes us back to the couple’s days of courtship. So here we have a serenade where the singer bemoans his inability to climb up the ladder to his lady’s chamber, a ladder that has already been metaphorically created in the poem by mention of his sung tones that spiral up to her. The music, as if to gainsay this upwardly aspiring imagery, takes a downward direction, a mood established right at the beginning by the sighing figuration of descending accompanying quavers on which the singer superimposes his sweet if slightly anonymous melody. Despite the composer’s marking of Heiter, lebhaft there is something definitely melancholy in a situation that is to do with the suitor’s rebuff, however affectionate and temporary. The lady described as ‘die strenge Schöne’ is of unimpeachable moral probity; she leaves us in no doubt that shenanigans of any kind are out of the question. It would take a heartless performer to find in this music anything convincingly ‘Heiter und lebhaft’. Another composer might have set these words ironically as if two lovers were playing a game of pretending to distance themselves (only to make their inevitable coming together more joyous) but this is music of patent sincerity—a kind of slightly down-at-heel devotion which is typical of the later Schumann when he is demonstrating his commitment to the exacting Clara. In fact ‘die strenge Clara’ (with all that phrase’s implications of strength and incorruptibility) would do rather well to describe the increasingly formidable Frau Schumann. What has definitely changed since 1840 is Schumann’s control of the courtship process, the natural assumption of the masculine role of leadership and instruction of the blushing bride that is everywhere to be found in Myrten. Nine years later we find Clara increasingly in charge; by now, Schumann, if not exactly hen-pecked, has settled into an increasingly reclusive and non-demonstrative place within the domestic hierarchy. Amidst the composer’s depressions and withdrawals into his work it is Clara who has to run the day-to-day business of a large family and to provide the energy and direction otherwise lacking in the Schumann household. The composer’s gratitude and admiration for Clara’s skills and qualities are clear, but there steals into his music something lacking in the music of 1840, a kind of abject adoration where we feel guilt and self-blame play no little part.

The same applies to this music where a lover has to plight his troth and win his lady lover. The Burns duets of 1840 have a raciness where we can detect the impatience and strength of Schumann’s sexual reactions—with the implicit message to the listener that such a response is the most natural and healthy thing in the world. By 1849 the duets are in another mood: there is a bitter story behind Tanzlied (another Rückert setting), and Er und Sie (Kerner) yearns with magical music that is far more idealistic than sexual. In Er und Sie we may hear simply the domestic happiness of the married man for whom sexual union has now become merely a metaphor for the twinning of souls. More cynical observers might detect a lowering of libido after nine years of marriage and in Tanzlied a loss of confidence accompanied by the worm of jealousy—or at least an acceptance of a less romanticized reality in the relationships of men and women.

In Rückert’s printed sequence these two poems that open Schumann’s Minnespiel are the other way around. The poet’s order suggests a scenario whereby the girl, after teasing her hopeful lover with a beguiling appearance at the window, retreats into her rosy bower leaving the frustrated poet to sing her a serenade, his last chance of persuading her to allow him entrance to her bedchamber. The composer opts for the opposite effect—an unsuccessful serenade followed by the story of the rejection. The serenade had been conceived by Rückert as the spontaneous flowering of frustrated love and Schumann’s turnabout renders the whole sequence less immediate and powerful.

Schumann casts the first song (in G major and in common time) as an extended upbeat to the second, as if the G major of Meine Töne still und heiter were merely a dominant in the key of C major of Die Liebste hat mit Schweigen. For this second song there is a slight quickening of tempo in the piano interlude linking the two sections and a change to 6/8. Instead of a sense of culmination that Schumann clearly hoped for we find instead a tailing away and the song’s second section makes rather less musical sense than the first. Schumann is not the dab hand at strophic songs that Schubert became (after much hard work), and the strophic form here is little suited to these words which sometimes seem forced on to a pre-existing melody. The repetitions also seem to be imposed on the music with a series of gaps and hesitations that sometimes make little sense. From the point of view of melody and harmony the music is pleasant enough and at its best teasingly whimsical; whether this is a less good Schumann or a Schumann on the borders of a later style as he changes into a more modern and flexible mode, less constrained by the more conventional rules of song composition, remains a moot point. In any event this is music that sounds experimental and needs careful and persuasive performance to make an agreeable effect.

The composer has probably envisaged this song as coming from the lips of the very woman who has been the subject of a futile serenade in the preceding number—an idea that Eric Sams finds the first of the song’s various ‘eccentricities’. The link is the key of C major in which the first song of Minnespiel has ended, and in which Liebster, deine Worte stehlen begins with a recitative-like phrase for the first two lines of verse. By the fourth bar of music we have moved into G major for the main body of the song. The composer places the metronome mark (crotchet = 126) above the fifth bar of music indicating that the a tempo begins on the word ‘kann’ in the phrase ‘O wie kann ich dir verhehlen’.

The poem is in the shape of a litany, each verse beginning with the word ‘Liebster’ and going on to praise the lover’s words, his music, his lute strings and finally his songs. This is the text that might have been addressed to a great composer by his admiring amorata, and it shows what sort of rapturous support Rückert expected, and received, on the home front in return for his endless lyrics of devotion. (One can see why the poem appealed to Schumann: the poet becomes a composer here, the music inherent in his words, just as the composer becomes a poet, the text inherent in his music.)

Such a deliberately repetitive format surely calls for a strophic approach but Schumann does everything in his power to avoid this—the vocal lines are deliberately changed and varied both in terms of melody and rhythm; it is this above all that Sams finds perverse, and it is hard to disagree with him having just experienced a strophic setting in the second half of the first number that cried out for a durchkomponiert approach. The composer seems to have taken great pride in disguising the beginning of new verses by making them appear the continuation of earlier musical ideas—as at ‘Liebster, deine Lieder wanken’ where the beginning of the culminating strophe of Rückert’s poem is made to sound like a continuation of the previous verse. Only at the very end of the song do we hear a repetition of the music for ‘O wie kann ich dir verhehlen’ in the closing ‘O wie kann ich dir es danken’—a repetition that Schumann might have argued was suggested by the poet himself with his matching ‘O wie kann ich’ phrases.

The mood is one of impassioned outpouring of a new kind of continuous melody, a rapturous impression that is further fuelled by the tugging of vocal syncopations and the accompaniment that shadows and hugs the voice. The subject-matter of the piece (a hymn of praise by a woman to the artistic creativity of her beloved) suggests a link with the earlier Lied der Suleika from Myrten (‘Wie mit innigstem Behagen’), a song where the accompaniment also doubles the voice-part throughout, as if a musical metaphor for the unanimity of twinned souls. Whereas that song is gently and deliciously reflective this music is slightly artificially whipped into a state of an almost sexual ecstasy by a schneller marking half-way through. Schumann asks the performers to begin ‘not too fast at first and then more and more passionately’. When this composer resorts to this kind of generalized marking it shows that he has abrogated some of his compositional responsibility and simply hopes that the performers will do their best to put a song across as best they can. It is true that a fervent performance of this music can make all the difference, but the final impression is of a storm in a teacup—a kind of slightly inappropriate and unlikely ‘Liebestod’ invoked by the sound of the beloved’s words and music. The closing bars of the accompaniment feature a pianistic motif that seems to serve little purpose other than to provide a link with the opening flourish of the next song which opens with the same motif transposed a minor third higher. Careful listeners will note the similarity of this pattern of notes to the opening of the duet Botschaft from the Spanisches Liederspiel Op 74 composed a few months earlier.

the ripe fruit I grew for you alone.
I am your gardener, O tree of loyalty!
I am not jealous of others’ happiness:
I always find your dear branches decked anew
with fruit, where I once picked the fruit.

The duet ‘Ich bin dein Baum’ comes from the Minnespiel, Op 101, a group of eight Rückert settings composed after the failed May 1849 revolution in Dresden, where the Schumanns were living at the time. For this hymn to married love, Schumann demonstrates yet again the impact of Bach-influenced free counterpoint on his music.

Rückert’s poem is in two verses. The first of these is for the wife who claims that her husband is her trusty tree; the husband replies that he is her gardener. This provides almost biblical material for something that Schumann always loved to do (and which a more conservative composer like Mendelssohn avoided): to create a freewheeling duet where the words are thoroughly shaken up and mingled as the two voices singing different texts at the same time—even to the point of incomprehensibility as far as a listener is concerned. This type of linear conversation where texture piles on texture in an ever richer musical palimpsest is derived from Schumann’s study of Bach, as is his delight in a weave of counterpoint whereby the words, after they are announced in solo form, are obscured in an ever denser contrapuntal texture.

The greatest example of this in Schumann’s songs is the duet In der Nacht (‘Alle gingen, Herz, zur Ruh’) from the Spanisches Liederspiel Op 74, where the effect of the musical structure growing before our ears can be one of monumental grandeur. Ich bin dein Baum fails to achieve this partly for reasons of tessitura—a duet conceived for alto and bass will always have a more muted effect than a piece for soprano and tenor. Nevertheless Schumann knows that the alto voice has an important part to play in Bach’s music and it is the alto who opens the number with a complete setting of Rückert’s first strophe. The tune is a noble one, an impression enhanced by the plagal harmony we first hear colouring the crucial word ‘Baum’ (the duet is in E flat major, and A flat major plays an important subsidiary role). The accompaniment is in gently supportive duplets and triplets with occasions forays into the upper register of the keyboard in echo-like passages that suggest the addition of a flute or oboe obbligato in a Bach cantata—and this of course is exactly the effect that Schumann was aiming for.

The baritone enters in the dominant key of B flat with a melody that suggests a fugal counter-subject without it actually being one. He sings of course the words of Rückert’s second strophe but is not permitted a solo. (Not for the first time in this cycle we get the impression that the first baritone to sing this work must have been considered by the composer the weakest of the four singers.) Instead the mezzo sings her strophe again beginning only a single bar after the entrance of the baritone. The impression of contrapuntal strictness continues for at least five bars but for nine bars the alto sings exactly the same notes which now have to be differently harmonized by the composer (A flats changed to naturals because the baritone is singing in a different key). All this is something of a quiet tour de force on Schumann’s part, not least because it is scarcely noticed in performance. In this anarchy of interleaving strophes a listener would never be able to hear the baritone’s words without the aid of a printed text.

The fourth page of the song is by way of a stretto. The marking is Lebhafter and the mezzo sings her words for a third time, on this occasion beginning with a melodic shape derived from her main theme but quickly departing from it. There is only time for the first two of her lines (ending in ‘süßer Zucht’). The baritone manages only the first of his lines and we hear the phrase ‘du Baum der Treue!’ elongated to ‘du Baum der Treue, der Treue!’. The piano postlude climbs from the middle of the stave in sequential repetition and the piece ends with a wilting cadence that sounds like a musical sigh. This may not be one of Schumann’s best duets but it can make a touching effect in performance; the overtones of Bach are suitable for the religious tone of Minnespiel where the composer is unashamed to promote the state of marriage as something requiring an almost holy seriousness. It is perhaps this earnestness (the composer’s other four-singer cycles are Spanish in inspiration and thus more fun) that is both the cycle’s strength (as in the radiance of the last quartet) as well as its occasional weakness.

‘A beacon among the otherwise unilluminating songs of Minnespiel’, writes Eric Sams of this song, being arguably more than unfair to the others. Nevertheless by common consent this is the best-loved of the songs of the set, the one that is most often heard in recitals, and music that has retained the affection of those lovers of Schumann who have explored beyond the pages of Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -leben. The tenor that the composer had in mind for the first performance of this cycle must have been a fine one—he was after all given the responsibility of opening the work, and here he is again with another solo while the baritone is never given the opportunity to sing on his own.

The preceding duet has finished unequivocally in E flat major; in order to tie the threads of the cycle closer together Schumann elects to keep this song in the same key, but in the interests of tonal variety he keeps the music away from the tonic for as long as possible. It is only in bar 5 that we actually reach E flat major and then only in first inversion; we have to wait after the end of the song’s first verse and halfway into the piano interlude (bar 18) until we are permitted to hear a tonic chord in root position. This shying away from the forthright and obvious—a kind of sideways glance into the infinite—is at the heart of the song’s haunting appeal.

This rapturous and touching miniature is inaugurated by a yearning vocal line that climbs as if aspiring to the stars themselves—a leap of a fifth, G to D, and then after a slip of a tone down to C, another leap up to top G—an octave traversed in one and a half bars. This is not so far in terms of physical distance but the determination of the ascent is indicative of the poem’s emotional range, its gaze fixed on sadly unreachable goals. Mein schöner Stern! is best sung by the voice that Schumann specifically had in mind for it. It is a test of a tenor’s ability to traverse his registers smoothly from chest to head voice and without awkward changes of gear—for some reason this song sounds far less effective in the soprano voice.

Together with the bravery of the climbing there is the pathos of the falling, in this setting accomplished with an exquisite grace as one beautiful chord and sumptuous harmony sinks into another and cradles the voice’s rueful earthward trajectory. In his thousands of lyrics Rückert encompassed every possible mood to describe his marital devotion; it should be no surprise that the dizzying progression of literary formulae that animate his oeuvre—many of Oriental inspiration—should include lyrics such as this that express abject devotion with a tinge of almost masochistic self-abasement. This probably takes its cue from the quasi-Marian tradition of the medieval troubadours and the courtly love tradition as an extension of that religious fervour. (The poet was after all an expert philologist and literary historian and prone to imitate any literary form from any age or culture.) It is significant that Schumann read a more modern and personal significance into these words. At this stage of his life, in the ninth year of a far from trouble-free marriage, the composer clearly felt that this kind of helpless—almost apologetic—adoration was appropriate for a love song to his beloved Clara. The words seem appropriate for an invalid who is terrified of becoming an intolerable burden to those he loves. As Eric Sams points out, the diary entry for Schumann’s thirty-ninth birthday (on 8 June 1849, a few days after these songs were written) includes the sad words ‘Mein 39 Geburtstag. Die gute Clara und meine Melancholie’—as if these two things were at the opposite ends of a benighted bi-polar existence. Of course these were early days as far as the composer’s mental illness and terminal deterioration were concerned, but there is already an indication of Schumann’s helplessness in the face of his bouts of depression. In finding within the Liebesfrühling such a text as this, he placed at the heart of the cycle something searingly honest and frighteningly relevant.

And also very beautiful. We have already discussed the vocal line but the piano plays an equally crucial part: the depth of those opening bass octaves and the progression of ninths and sevenths that underpin the singer’s spiralling journey heavenwards—almost bluesy or Poulencian in their cushioned mezzo-staccato sensuality—are absolutely unforgettable. Bearing in mind that Bach and counterpoint had played such a large part in the preceding duet it is hardly surprising that one of the most memorable features of Mein schöner Stern! is imitation—subtle touches of counterpoint where the tenor’s opening melody (bars 1 and 2) is to be heard in the piano’s tenor register in bars 3 and 4. In the little piano interlude after ‘Dampf in mir’ (bars 10–11) a jump of an octave, C to C in the left hand, sets off the high-flying pianistic echo of the word ‘Stern’ to the same notes as the singer has presented it at the song’s opening. In bringing the strophe to a close the vocal line wafts gently downwards for the next five bars—this part of the song descends the stave in incremental stages and ends up begging for help and forgiveness.

Whatever the painful personal aspects of this confessional, Schumann always knows when he has created a world-class tune, a sure-fire hit; he knows when he can safely repeat something that any audience would wish to hear again. He had done this in the earlier song Mondnacht (from the Op 39 Liederkreis), where the same phrase is repeated again and again; and in Mein schöner Stern! the two strophes are more or less musically identical. At the end of the first strophe, the words ‘Verklären hilf!’ are underscored by an octave jump between two B flats in the left-hand accompaniment followed by an eloquent rise of a fifth (E flat to B flat, bar 16) in the right hand. At this point the accompanist feels as if he or she had entered a thicket of contrapuntal entries, each one significant for a hidden reason. Another pair of left-hand B flats in bar 17, an octave apart, leads to a dominant–tonic shift into E flat major. The composer dares to remain on this long-awaited chord for an entire bar (bar 18) while a pair of E flats, also an octave apart, resonate gently yet grandly in the left hand. The right hand provides a fragment of melody (G–A flat) and the left-hand bass falls a semitone from its E flat perch to a D, and then a fifth lower to G. The effect of all this shifting without really moving position is one of listless helplessness—however musically luxurious. The entry of the voice on the word ‘Mein’ signals that we are about to embark on a musical repeat and listeners must prepare themselves to be ravished for a second time. The music for the first verse is repeated with different words very much in the same spirit. It is as if the singer/composer/poet is trying to attain the same spiritual level as that of his partner, attempting to reach the starry milieu which is her natural habitat, and always failing while his gaze is fixed heavenward in almost childlike admiration. The seven-bar postlude is a thing of beauty that adds further melodic material (bars 36–39) not heard in the main body of the song; the music is here tinged with the subdominant, the plagal colour that adds an air of holiness to this remarkable ceremony of the emotions. And all the while those falling bass octaves in the accompaniment, a motif in themselves, sound like sighing obeisances, a musical metaphor for a kind of genuflection of the spirit as if Schumann’s depression had been given a kind of musical voice both haunting and impotent.

Schumann must have been fond of this poem; he set it as a rather commodious duet as part of the Op 37 Liebesfrühling. The composer seems to have found its words expressive of old German tradition—if he were an Englishman he might have been tempted to write a song about dancing around the Maypole, and here I cannot help but think of the riotously effective final movement of Britten’s Spring Symphony which begins with the evocative sound of a cow-horn. In this Schumann setting there is similarly room for ungainly dancing by Breughelesque peasants with a hint of the hobnail boot. As in Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen from Dichterliebe and the duet Ländliches Lied Schumann shows himself amused by the idea of providing music for an imagined German village in times gone by. This setting is far from free of the heaviness that this kind of sonic celebration by good-hearted yeomanry implies, indeed it is strange to see that this poem is printed in the Gedichte opposite another of the most rarefied character—Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen—to be much later immortalized by Mahler in music of magical evanescence.

Here, on the other hand, Schumann asks for solidity in four parts from the voices. It is the demanding task of the piano to provide the ‘fizz’ of the vaunted wine that is distributed as a gift by the generous landlord. The marking is Lebhaft, but this direction is modified by a more conservative metronome marking (crotchet = 84) which keeps something of a rein on all the helter-skelter. A loud B flat major chord from the piano launches the first phrase, which is written for unaccompanied voices. Swirling sextuplets in bar 4 are the piano’s more lively commentary on this portentous opening and the song continues in this manner—the voices hearty (with sometimes a suggestion of their being in their cups) while the piano provides a forward impetus—writing that has a kind of almost frivolous Mendelssohnian ebullience that is seldom encountered in Schumann’s music of this period. It is hard, however, to imagine Mendelssohn approving of the clashes between E flat and E natural that occur five times in a row in the passage in the accompaniment that leads to the recapitulation of the main them in bars 46–9.

All of this provides the opportunity to place a scherzo within the structure of Minnespiel at exactly the moment that is required. Mein schöner Stern! needs a foil, and the song after this is strangely immobile—Schumann’s feeling for musical architecture has not let him down. The piece is rendered only faintly ridiculous by all the repetitions and elongations—in fact Schumann has chosen a two-strophe poem that is clearly too short for the musical structure he has in mind as the central panel of his cycle—hence certain words and phrases outstaying their welcome. The musical significance given to the words ‘Doch währt es nur der Tage drei!’ in the closing section of the movement seems completely out of the proportion to the meaning of the words. In fact this seems to be a rare case when the musical shape completely swamps the poem—even if this is not the case at the beginning of the setting. At the very end we are so satiated with the proclamation that ‘Schön ist das Fest des Lenzes’ that the final echo ‘O schön!’ cannot help sound anything but coy, even faintly comical. If Schumann wants us to be both amused by, and somewhat irritated by, these hick revellers drunk on their three-day binge he has succeeded splendidly. His real intention might have been to display the priapic energy of spring but there is something too routine about this music to achieve that purpose. (That is why we are tempted to think of it as sung by genial rustics.) It is as if the composer only dimly remembers at this point the imperatives of physical desire at first hand; he finds himself here at a different phase of his life, no longer the young man, no longer the impatient husband-to-be. In this music we can hear the ritual of spring courtship but Schumann’s own involvement is definitely at a distance. Like so much else in Minnespiel it is not that the music is bad, it is merely different. In losing the old Schumann we have to decide whether to welcome the new on his own terms, or simply to bemoan past glories. Schumann confined his vocal quartets and larger ensembles to 1849 and the years following; it would have been fascinating to see what he might have made of such a construction nine years earlier.

Schumann sets himself an impossible task in this song, and the result is something that Sams describes as ‘very singular’. Rückert’s poem in rhyming triplets is a challenge that is all but insurmountable. The shape of the poem is such that for each of seven strophes the song falls into three two-bar phrases (each of these a setting of a single line of the poem) with the occasional variation of a four-bar phrase where Schumann contrives to extend the musical length through repetition of the words. This makes for something very static as the music can never ‘take off’ and flower into a melody of any real duration; the strong rhymes of words like ‘Schutz’ and ‘Putz’ (not to mention ‘Trutz’ and the almost comically archaic ‘Bollwerk’—try singing ‘bulwark’ in an English song) help to defy the composer’s attempt to avoid the sense of a succession of end-stopped lines. The melody does go on beyond these short phrase-lengths, but it can all too easily sound like a succession of lame sequences.

The key is G minor, a good choice from the point of view of the cycle’s structure—it is after all the relative minor of the preceding quartet. The choice of the alto voice for this song seems to suggest an aria from a Bach passion, and the minor-key tonality and the slow tempo suggest the crucifixion of marriage rather than its joy. Connubial devotion such as this is a serious matter certainly, but Schumann seems to have turned it into a musical Pietà. He has searched hard among Rückert’s many lyrics to find a poem that mentions the strife and bitterness of the world that lies beyond the marital haven and the singer who performs this song will appear to have the weight of the world on her shoulders. This reminds us, surely, of Clara in the later years of her marriage, the same Clara who is fighting to salvage her own playing career while bringing up a large family and acting as a link between her increasingly uncommunicative husband and the outer world.

If we can accept that Mein schöner Stern! is Schumann’s self-portrait at this time (the adoring husband incapable of being much more than a silent worshipper) we surely have here a picture of Clara as Schumann sees her: someone utterly devoted and determined, his rock, someone who still believes completely in him—but all at the price of a kind of marital martyrdom. At this time Schumann writes ‘Die gute Clara’ in his diary in conjunction with mentioning his own ‘Melancholie’—he might have added ‘die arme Clara’, ‘poor Clara’, someone who might sing ‘Erbarme dich’ on her own account. At another time in Schumann’s life fervent words such as these might have produced music of a different kind, but any ecstasy here has a cap on it like the low ceiling of the tessitura of the vocal line—it is the ecstasy of suffering, the music firmly anchored in a chromatic maze of suspension and harmony that suggests struggling to emerge from an agonizing situation without any success. This sense of going around in circles is the result of the composer’s decision to adopt a strophic musical structure that repeats the song’s first fourteen bars (each sequence encompassing two strophes of the poem) which we hear three times plus an eleven-bar coda. This is indeed ‘singular’ music. It sounds obsessive and deliberately repetitive, as if the woman were chanting a mantra, but for the sympathetic listener it has a kind of noble pathos. Nevertheless, unlike the popular Mein schöner Stern! I have never heard this song taken out of context and performed as a chosen solo song in recital.

After an extremely static song in G minor the shift, dominant–tonic, into C major signals lift-off. This is one of Schumann’s most exultant and energetic duets (the marking is Mit Feuer, the metronome marking a moderate crotchet = 108 to enable a faster tempo—marked Schneller—for the last verse). This music is a paean for two voices on the subject of love. There is no attempt here to write elaborate two-part music in layers of conflicting meaning: the voices are together for the main body of the song with a highly effective passage of writing in canon (beginning ‘Schwör’ es! ich hör’ es’) in the music for the poem’s third verse. The piano-writing is in triplets throughout and begins in arpeggios that sweep up the keyboard in a stretch of two octaves, something that gives the music a real élan—this is writing that takes wing, something of a relief in the context of a work that, for all its beauties, has had rather too many static moments.

When Rückert writes the opening strophe—‘The thousand greetings / That we send you’—he clearly means that he, the poet, is getting together with various agents of nature to salute his beloved wife. Schumann takes the ‘wir’ (‘we’) as an excuse to combine soprano and tenor in a duet that is a mirror image of the very different duet for alto and baritone which is No 3 of this cycle. In verse 5 the composer changes Rückert’s words ‘Schon vielmal schrieb ichs / Noch vielmal schreib’ ichs’ (‘I have already written it many times, and write it again many times’) and substitutes the verb ‘singen’ (‘to sing’) for ‘schreiben’ (‘to write’)—thus ‘sang’ and ‘sing’ in past and present tenses of the verb that happen to be exactly the same in English as in German.

In truth there is little depth to this music; it is one of those constructs that has about as much real substance as a puff pastry. But a good performance can be thrilling as few other of the Schumann duets—it throbs and flutters and dances with a spring in its step in both meanings of the phrase. This is Robert and Clara declaring their love to the rooftops without a care in the world. Towards the end of the song (from the repeat of ‘Laß deine Düfte / Küsse mich wähnen’) there is a thrilling use of a dominant pedal initiated by a battery of repeated triplets in the accompaniment. The postlude is one of the composer’s most audacious—it struts and prances as if it were the proudest of love’s steeds. This music bristles with merry defiance and it has attitude. Like many of the great songs of 1849 Schumann in this mood is practically, if not exactly, indistinguishable from the famous composer of 1840 who is fighting the noble battle for his wife. Of course he had won her for nine years when Minnespiel was written but there are traces here of the determined young warrior of yore. On a good day he is still capable of defiance, still able to recapture the spirit of struggles long won.

Truly as the sun shines,
Truly as the flame flashes,
Truly as the cloud weeps,
Truly as spring blossoms,
As truly did I feel
Holding you in my embrace:
You love me, as I love you,
I love you, as you love me.

The sun may cease to shine,
The cloud may weep no more,
The flame may flash and fade,
The spring may blossom no more!
But we shall embrace
And always feel:
You love me, as I love you,
I love you, as you love me.

Schumann had already set this text as a duet—and most beautifully—as the last of his Liebesfrühling cycle Op 37, but the calm radiance of this quartet trumps the earlier work. The key is G major and the music glows with a kind of seraphic calm that is seldom found in Schumann’s highly strung work—this quartet was clearly written on a good day. The melody is a winner and entrances everyone who hears it for the first time. This music (marked Nicht schnell) is on the slow side, but it is also determined to face down misfortune and opposition. The sound of four concerted voices creates here—for the first time in Minnespiel—an impression of a musical vehicle moving along on sumptuously oiled wheels and able to overcome all obstacles. Behind the measured Bewegung of an accompaniment of gently rolling quavers a vocal line in phlegmatic crotchets unfolds, all within a piano dynamic that conceals an unstoppable momentum born of inner strength.

Rückert’s poem is in two long stanzas of eight lines each. After the initial unfolding of melody using the imagery of sun, cloud, flame and spring there is a moment of dialogue between the male and female voices on ‘So wahr hab’ ich empfunden, / Wie ich dich halt’ umwunden’ as if the two ‘ich’s referred to different people, man and wife. At the beginning of the poet’s second strophe we hear the first note of open defiance—for nothing is going to take away what the lovers possess between them. The accompaniment blossoms into pulsating triplets and the music becomes agitated for four lines. And yet this is only a device whereby the return of the tonic at ‘Wir wollen uns umwinden’ (and the return to a breadth of tempo following a build up of speed and intensity) is set up to appear overwhelmingly convincing, an arrival of unruffled G major grandeur that is entirely appropriate to bring a cycle of this kind to a close. But Schumann is not so unsubtle as to end in this manner. There follows a passage of the utmost tenderness—a retreat into the plagal realms of C major—for ‘Du liebst mich, wie ich dich’; this is a moment of the most private dialogue for mezzo and tenor, the two voices sheltered as it were within the four-part texture where the soprano and baritone, the outer voices, are made to protect and cocoon this moment of intimacy as if guardian angels. This is all part of a gradual unwinding process over one and a half pages whereby the music returns to a state of dreamy domestic bliss. The last words we hear are those quoted above in the last of umpteen starry-eyed repetitions.

This is music fit for Robert and Clara’s stand against her father’s opposition—a couple radiantly vindicated in retrospect for the stand they took against Friedrich Wieck. One cannot forget that by 1849 the story of the Schumanns’ struggle to marry in 1840 had become well known to musicians and artists everywhere; Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barratt had eloped in defiance of her father’s wishes in 1846, and it is difficult to believe they were unaware of the Schumanns who were one of the first ‘power-couples’ in the arts. Minnespiel was surely meant as a kind of update for the benefit of the outside world—a celebration of a fairy-tale marriage (in reality far more complicated than any fairy story) as well as a musical means of burnishing the Schumann legend. If Schumann was not the best role model for revolutionaries (having failed to play any part in the Dresden uprising of 1848 apart from diffident armchair support in theory) he and Clara were highly successful role models for the many young lovers growing up in an increasingly free and questioning society who were determined to defy the dictates of decorum in pursuing their ideals of romantic love. Both the Schumanns and the Brownings won their battles against dictatorial parents, and in both cases the story of their struggles became part and parcel of their fame in their own lifetimes. If Schumann had never written a work like Minnespiel one feels that he would have been expected to do so by his contemporary admirers.